A Little Story About An Electronic Handbrake

"TwinCharged - Is Now UK Opponaut" (twincharged)
03/14/2014 at 13:18 • Filed to: renault

Back in 2009, the family went on holiday to England. I was 11. At the airport, we got ourselves a hire car. A Renault Grand Scenic, in blue. This was it:

I thought it was cool. Manual shifter mounted high up on the dashboard? Cool. Huge panoramic windscreen? Cool. Folding picnic tables? Cool. Digital gauges? Very cool. Well, I was 11...

2 things weren't that cool though - the 1.6L petrol had just 110bhp, with 112lb ft of torque. And it had one of these.

The electronic handbrake. We were utterly bamboozled by it. We spent a good part of 10 minutes in the parking lot of airport trying to work it out. No amount of poking, pulling and pressing released the brakes. Even the people behind the rental desk had no idea. By luck, we figured out the sequence. And we thought that was that.

Oh no it wasn't.

Upon arriving at the Royal Armouries Museum car park, we were forced to stop and engage the handbrake on a steep ramp because someone ahead was parking. Which meant we had to do a hill start on a bend. In an MPV stuffed with weighty luggage in the back.

Question: ever try to manage a gear lever, clutch, footbrake, accelerator, steering wheel and electronic handbrake all at once for the first time? Well my father will tell you this. For a person who had driven for more than 30 years with a conventional handbrake, it's impossible. Apparently, modern electronic handbrakes disengage automatically. We never got to find out if it did on the old Grand Scenic.

The hefty MPV lurched forward and then just gave up trying to move. We sat there spinning the wheels, the weedy little 1.6L petrol making one hell of a racket as the tyres screeched. My father was simply unable to match the accelerator and clutch with the release of the handbrake. The revs just shot up and we sat there, making wheelspin and smoke. We were forced to make a start from the bottom, forcing everyone to back up.

Two things we gathered: hill starts are tricky if you've got an electronic handbrake and are not used to it. And that the 1.6L engine really wasn't sufficient...

Here's a Reliant Scimitar I saw on that trip for your time.

DISCUSSION (4)

KirkyV > TwinCharged - Is Now UK Opponaut
03/14/2014 at 13:28

The 1.6 should've been fine: it sounds like you had duff tyres if you really were wheel spinning up a ramp. That said, though, I'm actually pretty surprised the hire company gave you a petrol; most Scenics are diesels.

...

I will agree, though, that electric handbrakes are a load of shit.

RazoE > TwinCharged - Is Now UK Opponaut
03/14/2014 at 13:46

He couldn't have just engaged the "handbrake" fully, started off then once he felt the clutch grab, release the "handbrake?"

dogisbadob > TwinCharged - Is Now UK Opponaut
03/14/2014 at 13:50

I wish the Scenic was sold over here :(

Nissan could badge it here as the Nissan Axxess

TwinCharged - Is Now UK Opponaut > RazoE
03/14/2014 at 13:54

I suspect that electronic handbrake was trickier than it seems. It was quite fiddly to be honest. You have to make sure to pull the handle all the way out (and it does come out a long way) and then press the button, which then immediately disengages the handbrake. It was probably the fiddly-ness of the thing itself that screwed by dad over - by the time he disengaged the handbrake, he'd already built up too many revs.